Category: Technology, History of

A Beautiful Instrument Displaying Sound on Paper
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Olaus Henrici (1840-1918) constructed a beautiful and tidy analog computer to analyze musical sound, publishing his efforts in The Philosophical Magazine in 1894. It was a mechanical fourier analyzer, in the heritage of the harmonic analyzer/tide predicting computer of James Thomson and his brother Lord Kelvin, analyzing a traced sound waveform. It was built upon in turn by Dayton Miller and much expanded.

William Fickinger has this solid description in his book, [Dayton] Miller’s Waves: An Informal Scientific Biography, (2011) found on page 69:

A little more background on the harmonic analyzer and Henrici as follows:
- Robert K. Otnes in The Oughtred Society, “Notes on Mechanical Fourier Analyzers” http://www.oughtred.org/jos/articles/V17.1_OtnesPaper.pdf
- Full text of the Henrici paper from the Biodiversity Heritage Library http://biodiversitylibrary.org/item/122066#page/124/mode/1up
- On Olaus Henrici https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaus_Henrici
- http://www.phys.cwru.edu/ccpi/Harmonic_analyzer.html
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A Bit on the History of the Future of Sucking–Vacuum Trains (1945)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2590

John B. Prather launched an idea in 1945 for building a high-speed pneumatic passenger/freight train connecting New York City to Philadelphia. His New York-Philadelphia Vacuum Tunnel, Preliminary Design Features and Economic Analysis was exceptionally hearty. The idea is interesting in a removed, lets-not-do-it-for real-way because, well, it just doesn’t seem to make sense in the long run, at least beyond the building of the thing to show that it could be done. And I don’t doubt that could be the case–and I just don’t know why it was necessary.

[If you’d like to own the original report I’m offering for sale on my blog–there seems to be no others available, with no listings in WorldCat. If you’re interested see the listing follow this link or go to the general catalog and look up [TRAINS] The Future of Sucking: Vacuum Express Train, NYC to Philly, 1945.]

Mr. Prather’s approach seems to be the work of an engineer, or at least he had some help. I doubt though that he had any help from a structural engineer or site geologist–his proposal was to build this tunnel 100′ down through bedrock when it could be found, a level hundred-feet below the surface, from NYC to Philadelphia. The tube would accommodate an aluminum-shelled 400′-long train that would be hauling 350 people and 175 tons of freight at speeds of 400-600+ mph, making the run between the two cities in about 20 minutes. Not bad. He figures too that all of the freight could be offloaded in 7.5 minutes. This would make for a very busy train, though Prather doesn’t tell us how many runs a day it would be making. This was all preliminary.

The 16.2′-wide tunnel would be 456,720 feet long, and would cost $173 million to excavate and $41 million to line with cement–according to the author. The total cost for the ordeal would be about $334 million and would take 6 years, start to finish–that includes all of the tunneling, which would swallow/excavate/face 300′ per day.

I don’t see, really, how this could be so narrow a tunnel–I’m not an engineer but it would seem that wear, heat and the abuse and so on that a massive and dense 400′-long missile going 400+mph would require something that was more than 125% of the width of its trains.

There is however precedence for a massive tunnel of something like this size being built in something like this time–the Delaware Aqueduct is 82 miles long and 13 feet wide, and was built during the Second World War (1939-1945) , so, perhaps if enough people and money were thrown at a project like the vacuum tunnel could actually be built (barring geological problems).

But it would all be worth it: Prather suggests that the overall revenue from the operation of the train to be $196 million/year with $32 million in yearly operating expenses. Which means that the whole thing could be paid for in three years or thereabouts. So if the things was started in 1946, it would all be finished and paid for by 1956.

I’ve looked at a number of proposals like this over the course of this blog–like almost filling up the Narrows between Staten Island and Manhattan with an airport and seaport, and making a series of transoceanic airports for flights between the continents, and dropping a gigantic shell filled with people from the top/interior of the Eiffel into a narrow hole filled with water, and covering Midtown Manhattan with a rooftop airport, and covering Midtown Manhattan with a glass-ish dome, and so on–and I know that it is good for at least one thing: superb classroom discussion fodder of why something like this does or doesn’t make good physical/economic etc. sense.

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Future, History of the — History of the Future — Technology, History of
“When Will We Have Television?”, 1937

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This is the delightful ABC of Television, published in 1937 by the sci-fi and early modern tech guru and visioneer Hugo Gernsback’s Short Wave & Television magazine–it is a separate publication in it own printed wrappers. The pamphlet includes technical basics (“fundamentals of scanning”, “mechanical systems”, “Cathode ray emission”, transmitter operation”) as well as some popular and necessary information, like “when will we have television” and a list of television stations. (Just for the record, this publication lists 25 active stations, including low wattage stations like W2XAX, the Atlantic Broadcasting Company, in NYC at 50 Watts–there were 9 broadcasters with 150 Watts or less of the 25 listed. There’s also a list of nine other “discontinued” television stations (“experimental visual licenses and permits discontinued or expired”). The “Experimental Visual License: is a very nice turn-of-phrase.)

[If you’d like to own the original, see our books for sale section, here: https://historyofideasblog.com/books/]

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Technology, History of
Giant Planes of the Hopeful Future, 1928
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This mammoth German aircraft appeared in the pages of the Illustrated London News on 31 March 1928,a sneak-peak into the future. It may have been a shock to British aviation sensibilities–it was supposed to dwarf the largest such plane that the Brits had (the Calcutta) : 158′ to 93′ wingspan; 44 tons to 9 fully loaded wright; engine power, 6000hp to 1500hp, with twelve very impressive 500 hp fore-and-aft engines.

The plane made an appearance in real-life in the air in July 1929 as the Dornier Do X, the largest and heaviest flying boat in history, with pretty much the stats that appeared on it a year earlier. (Stuff happens) and the Dornier is broken up for scrap by 1937.
- Specs (via Wiki): “Crew, 10-14; capacity, 66-100 passengers; length, 40 m[13] (131 ft 4 in); wingspan, 48 m[13] (157 ft 5 in); height, 10.25 m (33 ft 7 in); wing area, 450 m2 (4,844 ft2); empty weight, 28,250 kg[13] (62,280 lb); max takeoff weight, 56,000 kg (123,460 lb); powerplant, 12 × Curtiss Conqueror water-cooled V12, 455 kW (610 hp) each; maximum speed, 211 km/h (131 mph; cruise speed, 175 km/h (109 mph); range, 1,700 km (1,056 mi); service ceiling, 3200 m (10498 ft); wing loading, 94 kg/m2 (19.3 lb/sq ft) (at 46 tons weight).”
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Aviation & flight — Technology, History of
A Transatlantic Flying Wing/Boat, 1927

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The beautiful aircraft was being built primarily on high hopes and a sleepless night, but that’s okay. This was a vision for a transatlantic aircraft, and appeared int he September 1927 issue of Popular Mechanics, and was an interesting and in some ways remarkable insight to the coming prospects of long-distance passenger flight. The Wright flight was only 24 years before this, and the Lindbergh solo crossing of the Atlantic occurred just a few months prior to this publication, an event which no doubt added fire to the speculation of future transatlantic flights. The artist imagines a massive aircraft with a 400′ wingspan, the wings offering room enough for sleeping quarters for the passengers. The Transatlatic flight was technically difficult, and outside of crossings by the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg in the late 1920’s, passenger service really wasn’t instituted on any large scale until after WWII. There were crossings by aircraft in the early 1930’s, but there (as with the famous flight by Dornier in the DO-X seaplane in 1931) the majority of those flights were over the ocean to South America, and then continued to North America. A notable exception is the Yankee Clipper. which was a luxury flight (carrying 74 and sleeping 36) and which was a massive aircraft, though the real plane’s wingspan was less than half (at 150′) of the visioneered aircraft below. In any event, recognition is in order to the designer who thought about flight in this manner just 10 weeks¹ after Charles Lindbergh made his NYC-Paris flight.

A newsreel of the parade held in Lindbergh’s honor in NYC on June 13, 1927 showing the enormous reception of the new world-wide hero:

Notes:

1. The September issue of Popular Mechanics would have been issued in early August (as we can see in the stamp on the cover, this issue being received by the Brooklyn Public Library August 8.

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Aviation & flight — Technology, History of
When a Little Bit of the Future Got To WWI

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2600

The hope for technological advancement to hasten the end of the war were much discussed during WWI–the dreams and aspirations sometimes winding up in a serialized fashion in magazines such as l’Heure, seen below. The promise of the magazine “The Hour” was to reveal the nature of a machine discovered that would bring an end to the war. It was highly fanciful, this machine, and highly effective, as we can see by the large field littered with German soldiers, done in by a death ray/spray of some sort. The whole of it looks more like a Wells’ Martian creation than anything else.

[Image source: Imperial War Museum, http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/19414]

And long as I am here and the reference is at hand, I would like to point out this terrific link to the very interesting La Guerre Infernale by Pierre Giffard, and with illustrations by the iconic A. Robida:

[Source, with a set of all of the illustrations is found here: http://www.merveilleuxscientifique.fr/auteurs/robida-alfred-la-guerre-infernale/]

But what I really wanted to talk about was on the much smaller and real level, particularly this exploration of battlefield lighting, found in the August 1916 issue of Popular Mechanics Magazine. It was one of the technological advances in this war that brought something that worked better and much more simple than that displayed in the magazine–the “simple” flare gun, also known in England as the Very pistol. It was new to war (along with such things as the tank, military applications of barbed wire, depth charges, flamethrowers, and such) and it was of course very effective. And deadly. And protective. It illuminated a field of battle, particularly Dead Man’s Land, that stretch of land between the two offensive lines that was a meeting place of death, cluttered with bodies, spoiled earth, water-filled craters, barbed wire, waste, and so on–and it was sometimes into this sort of field that an attack would be made under cover of darkness, and it was the Very pistol that would be fired to illuminate the attackers, who would suffer greatly from it. In any event, it was a far better response to a need than the aerial torpedo torch.

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Strange Things in the Sky — Technology, History of — World War I
The Pistol in Air-to-Air Combat (1914)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2588

The news of the Wright Brothers and their historic powered flight in December 1903 was a monumental deal, though the report of the success was buried in middle of the Scientific American issue that first covered it. Eleven years later heavier-than-air powered aircraft went from being from non-existent but with potential/possibility to machines used in war. It took eight years from the Wright plane for an aircraft to be used in combat dropping bombs on people, a role that would of course be exploded beyond all recognition just a few years later. During the first few months of WWI aircraft were used but mostly for surveillance and mapping–aerial combat existed, sort of, though without any firepower. The first air victories were results of aircraft ramming one another (the first seems to have been August 25, 1914), while the first instance of one plane shooting down another didn’t occur until the war was in its second month, a French plane shooting down a German aircraft with a machine gun and a rifle.¹

These notes are simple background for the image that I found in The Illustrated London News (September 19, 1914) showing aerial combat between a British Bristol and a German Taube. What is striking of course is that the Royal Flying Corps aircraft was attacking with the co-pilot firing a pistol at the German plane–a little unexpected. The description of the image identifies the pilot of the German aircraft (“Sergeant Werner, the first German to fly over Paris and drop bombs”) and that he had been on a reconnaissance flight mapping allied positions–how that information was known I do not know. In any event the British aircraft pursued the German and nearly had it within rights–that is until German soldiers on the ground returned fire on the British aircraft, forcing it to retire.

Luckily I own the war years for the ILN and I do believe that this was the first image in that journal showing air-to-air combat. The ILN does have earlier images showing the first bombing raids from aircraft and also of air-to-ground machine gun attacks, but at this point this may be the first of its kind. It all seems very removed–quaint,even–given how quickly things developed over the next year.

Notes
1. “On October 5, 1914, Sergeant Joseph Frantz and Corporal Louis Quénault of Escadrille VB24 scored the first air-to-air kill (not involving ramming – see Pyotr Nesterov) of the war, shooting down a German Aviatik B.II with machine gun fire. Quénault fired two 48-round magazines at the Germans. The Germans returned fire with rifles. When the Frenchman’s 8 mm Hotchkiss M1909 machine gun jammed, he successfully returned fire with his rifle. Oberleutnant Fritz von Zangen and Sergeant Wilhelm Schlichting of FFA 18 fell to their deaths. This is believed to be the first air-to-air kill in any war.”–a good Wikipedia contribution on the Voisin III, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voisin_III
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Aviation & flight — Technology, History of — World War I
Floating Transoceanic Airport Network, 1930’s

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[My apologies for the formatting issues on this–Typepad wouldn’t allow me to get rid of the italics and bold]

This short shelf-lived idea was that of Edward R. Armstrong (1880-1955), who in 1927 first published his plan for a series of ocean-moored 1200’x200’ floating platforms standing 100′ above the waves for refueling and whatnot for transcontinental flights. These five-acre stations—named the “Langley” in honor of Samuel Pierpont Langley¹— would be placed every 375 miles across the ocean. Or perhaps there would be just five of these floating emplacements–the data changes. It doesn’t look like a very practical (or good) idea, but Armstrong received a $750,000 piece of development change from du Pont and GM, which was major dollars in 1929.

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Aviation & flight — Technology, History of
An “Air Garage” Airport Skyscraper, 1927

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There were a number of interesting/unusual/bizarro ideas for air travel int he heady aeroplane decade of the 1920’s (search for “airport” in the google search box at right to find some of this blog’s posts on the subject). This one appeared in Popular Mechanics for July, 1927–a 14-story “Air Garage” that would serve to launch 14 planes from its 14 floors, times four, I guess. I reckon that the interior of each floor would function like a garage/taxi/pre-flight area, and the planes would use the areas closest to the exterior of the structure as a runway. No doubt the writer was envisioning the need for this as the popularity of the airplane was, well, soaring, and the vision may have inched the airplane close to the ubiquity of the Model A. I commend the writer for thinking Big.

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Aviation & flight — Technology, History of
“Curtain of Death Drawn Before the Flying Huns” 1918

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It is difficult to appreciate the incredibly quick and adaptable nature of the airplane as it progressed in the 15 years between the first Wright Brothers powered flight in 1903 to the end of WWI. One of the issues that became immediately apparent at the beginning of the war in recognizing the offensive capacity of the airplane were the defenses needed to combat it. Balloons have been shot down since (at least) the U.S. Civil War, but the airplane of course presented an entirely different threat. Part of the big realization in creating ground-based anti-aircraft weapons was that it was necessary to develop something that would be sent skyward and exploded, a wall-of-not-sound-but-metal that could and would rip apart enemy fliers. And so we find such a thing here in the mass-produced everyman’s technoid magazine, Popular Mechanics, in May 1918. The illustrator/editor used both the words “curtain” and “wall” though I am sure that curtain is more descriptive. In the illustration (on page 695) we see AA battery emplaced in defense of London firing “bursting shrapnel” that were to act as a kind of fence, keeping the enemy aircraft “in the upper air”–forced into higher elevations by the anti-aircraft fire severely affected the (non-) precision bombing of the day. Lower approaches would leave the aircraft open to other sorts of withering defensive responses.

The legend reads that the high altitude bombing was “ineffective”, though it doesn’t indicate whether the bombing was still attempted, or not.

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Technology, History of — World War I

Category: Technology, History of

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[My apologies for the formatting issues on this–Typepad wouldn’t allow me to get rid of the italics and bold]